Let me peer out at the world through your lens. (Maybe I'll shudder, or gasp, or tilt my head in a question.) Let me see how your blue is my turquoise and my orange is your gold. Suddenly binary stars, we have startling gravity. Let's compare scintillation - let's share starlight.

Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words and not one of them can save me.

I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music - Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering 'The Lost Chord' on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.

We all find ourselves involved in projects or activities that confound us-when or why did I say I would do this? What was I thinking? I needed a poem for myself that said-pause longer. Think again.

why are we so monumentally slow?

I'm writing mostly to thank you for living you eighty years and to tell you I love you and think of you often.

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.